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With a high youth population, the towns' comprehensive children's centres helped inspire Sure Start
The wheel turns. An industrial powerhouse declines from the busiest cotton-spinning town in the world, with 2.5m spindles in 1870, to a handful of specialist, residual textile firms today. A great international name shrinks to provincial status; was it Blackburn we were talking about. Or Burnley? Or Bolton? What is the difference between them anyway? The future lies elsewhere. Such conversations no doubt still take place in bastions of ignorance away from the north, but reality is now winning out. Not only in the shape of successful engineering of aircraft, but in news about the exceptional number of young people who live in Blackburn with Darwen. One in four of the population is under 15, officially the largest proportion in the UK. Elsewhere, this might be considered a drain on resources. In Blackburn with Darwen, it is being turned to good account. The towns' comprehensive children's centres helped inspire Sure Start and, through careful budgeting and protection from cuts, continue to flourish. No local child is more than a pram push away. It has an elected "youth MP" and youngsters are involved in the governance of such regenerative centres as Blackburn College and the £8m YouthZone which opens later this year. Its online children and young people's directory is hosted at a textese web address: URBwD.com. Young people, in return, overwhelmingly want to stay and make their lives in Blackburn and Darwen. There could be no better shoulder to the wheel than that.
